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I’ve been asked by a few people how I did the latest news block at the bottom of every page on the TerraMedia website. It’s actually really simple when you get down to it, so here you go, all you need to know to do your own latest posts block, it could be used for anything from latest blog posts, latest images in an image gallery, new content, virtually anything.
Popularity: 28% [?]
Over at TerraMedia I’ve been quite busy over the past few weeks working on not only a new design for TerraMedia, but a completely new website!
It is now using Drupal instead of Joomla and the theme is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict along with being completely cross browser compatible. Developing it for Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer 7 was really a walk in the park. Internet Explorer 6 caused me even more pain then usual due to the random portfolio image in the header that is on an angle.
I probably spent a good 50 hours just on that part of the design, not including the other IE6 fixes.
The reason it took so much work was primarily because I was using a pair of PNG 24’s for the images, one as the background image and one as the changing image. Using the PNG Fix module for Drupal fixed the background image fine, but because the image in the foreground was being called through php, the Javascript used in the PNG Fix module wasn’t picking up that it was a PNG, thus not filtering the transparency correctly.
After much fiddling around and trying to make this work, I ended up just combining the two images rather than having the background image seperate, and calling them randomly through Javascript instead. This is a little bit more tedious and doesn’t run correctly through a block like the PHP, but it does do the job. Unfortunately adding more images to the pool takes a little bit more than just uploading them, but I can live with that for now.
The left sidebar also took a little bit of fiddling around since it uses li:hover’s as well as a:hover’s and IE6 doesn’t render li:hover’s correctly and it renders li’s in general differently to the other browsers. So unfortunately, some of the sidebar functionality is lost but it degrades gracefully and that’s the important thing when degradation comes into play.
What do you think of the new “Web 2.0″ style design and the new website in general?
Popularity: 35% [?]
I was doing some research on podcasts yesterday for a website I am working on at the moment.
The site is using Drupal, so there is a podcast module already available, I was just doing some research on how other people are laying out their podcasts, doing their designs and so on. While doing this, I found some interesting tag clouds.
If you have a look at:
Have a look at the tag clouds and the top categories.
On Podcast.net, the 4th biggest category is “Religion and Philosophy.”
On Podcast Alley the 4th biggest category is “Religion and Spirituality.”
On The Pod Lounge, the tied second biggest tag is “Religion and Spirituality.”
At the time of writing this, 3 of the top 10 podcasts on Podcast Alley were religious podcasts, this has since changed though.
I just found it interesting that in a world where religion seems to be quite unpopular, particularly in my generation, not just Christianity, but religion in general, that some of the most popular podcasts and one of the largest genre’s is in fact religious.
I suppose in a way, religion is ideally suited to podcasting, since sermons can easily be recorded, and in many places have been getting recorded for a long time. So it’s just one extra step to upload them as a podcast.
What do you think?
Popularity: 15% [?]